6. Rogue Trader (1999)
Ewan McGregor stars as Barings trader Nick Leeson, who brought down the U.K.’s oldest merchant bank with more than £800 million in unauthorized trades. Sent to Singapore while still in his early 20s, Leeson quickly made a name for himself as a savvy trader in the thriving Asia securities market. What his superiors didn’t realize was that the star trader was in fact making risky off-book trades and hiding the losses in an illicit account.
Leeson, who fled when the scam blew up and was finally captured in Frankfurt, is the template to which other rogue traders since then such as Kweku Adoboli at UBS, SocGen’s Jerome Kerviel, Kareem Serageldin at Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan’s London «Whale» Bruno Iksil have been compared. Colleagues have criticized the lack of remorse from Leeson, who studied psychology after his release from prison and now makes his living as a conference speaker in finance circles.
